The evergreen challenge in the e-commerce marketplace

The online shopping has become a thing lately. The ecommerce is growing so fast that in Italy 18.8 million of italian had purchased on Internet during the 2016. It usually happens that 12% of the people on the Internet google only to get informations about a specific product and the 88% actually want to purchase something. Considering the wide fields of items you can purchase online, usually italians prefers durables goods; at the top there are travels (49%), then books and music (48%), fashion (43%), tecnology (32%) and tickets for concerts/sports (32%). At the bottom of the consumer goods we find: beauty (25%), wine and alcohol (9%), food delivery (6%), goods for children (6%) and fresh food (2%).

The fast growth of ecommerce brings new challenges to retailers, however. There are 2 factors that generally have an impact on the retailer's ecommerce success:

1. Volatility: Prices of products sold online are unpredictable. Customers can search for a product and see that it has a certain price in that moment, and then search for it again the same day and see that the price has changed. Amazon.com is very famous in these terms for changing prices so often during the day. In the graph below is relevant that the price of the Linksys e900 Wi-Fi Router has changed over 7 times during 24 hours. For shoppers there’s no way of knowing or predict this changement.

Price volatility isn’t just an headache for customers. Retailers found themselves forced to use a specific tool that helps them to change price several time a day in order to keep up with the competition, especially Amazon.

The rapidity of the price fluctuation has made impossible for the companies predict when the price of a certain product rises or drops. But this information is vital if retailers wants to protect the value of their business and be competitive. Customers have so many option when it comes to buy online, so make sure you offer them the best deal and this will put you in a success position.

2. Brand protection: protect the brand is becoming very difficult on the Internet. The value that the Brand built up through years could be destroyed with a snap of fingers if the brand doesn’t pay attention at who is selling its products online. Not only, Internet is full of counterfeit products that have a lower price are of lesser quality compared to the originals. The counterfeit products are easy to find on Internet, and retailers can enter the online commerce very easily and get customers worldwide.

Apple is just an example of counterfeit products and grey market. For what concern the Indian market, the Brand’s authorized retailers were 40% lower than usual. The reason why? The grey market is very common in that country. The illicit market is threat for the brand’s value. Brands are forced to check every day who sells their product online and at what price.

With the black market, the grey market and counterfeit product that are popping up everyday, brands need a solution fast. Using a tool that helps you finding where your products are sold and at what price is a good start.